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The goal of this article was to take a look at the latest Android Studio (v0.2.5) and see where it would take me in a single day.

For me an IDE should be simple, straightforward and hassle-free. The big pain in Android development has always been the IDE and more specifically the tooling around it.

Somehow the Eclipse plugins never worked well with the core Android tools and build system. Third party tools and plugins to offload dependency management to Maven were also far from ideal.

In short, it was a difficult marriage that ultimately led to choosing IntelliJ IDEA as the preferred platform for Android Development Tooling.

Unfortunately this again left developers with a 0.x product, meaning it’s going to be very rough around the edges. It’s a very difficult decision to make for developers. Stick with something you know but that is far from ideal, or go with something entirely new that is supposed to be better, but in reality could also take a very long time before it reaches some kind of stability.

For me another added complexity was a base platform that I didn’t know at all (IntelliJ IDEA) and a new build system (Gradle) that also isn’t fully featured yet for Android development.

But I decided to invest a single day on Android Studio and try to come to some kind of conclusion, while documenting the process along the way.